Looking back over my first year of teaching teen-adult ballet

When I started teaching teen-adult beginning ballet last fall (after subbing and doing some occasional private group lessons for a year or two), I approached it very much the same way I approach my teaching work as a college professor. I started with an objective -- the "big thing" I wanted my students to learn,  and I worked back from there, breaking that big objective down into its component parts. I did a lot of reading around adult learners, and especially around teaching dance to adults, but I also brushed up on dance anatomy and terminology, cross training for dancers, and more general ways to build the mind-body connection in people who aren't used to moving that much, or whose movement patterns have been very repetitive for a long time.

The objective I set was for my students to experience the pleasure of ballet while training their bodies and minds to the movement vocabulary of the art form. In short, I aimed high for them.

Breaking this down into a bunch of more concrete and measurable outcomes, I began thinking about the elements of ballet, and I came up with this schematic:

Once I had gone through this exercise in mental organization, I started to look at that big review I had done of the literature on teaching ballet to adults (and I use the term "literature" quite broadly here to include my own experiences of being instructed, videos and blogs by those giving and receiving instruction, books about ballet instruction more generally, and conversations with people far more knowledgable than myself). I was very attracted to a syllabus for total beginner adult students developed by Liane Fisher of Fisher Ballet Productions. Ms. Fisher is a Cecchetti trained, multiply credentialed expert in ballet and dance instruction, so it's no surprise that she has a really well-informed practice, and also no surprise that many elements of her syllabus mapped well to the schema I had created based on my own knowledge of ballet and my reading. 

Because her syllabus is geared to total novices in a seven-week course, and I would be teaching a mix of novices, those with a year or two of experience, returners (those who used to dance and are coming back after a hiatus), and more advanced students just wanting to work on foundations, and because I had a full 15-week semester for three hours a week, I treated her syllabus as a point of departure, adding to it elements drawn from other syllabi and my own interest in floor work as an essential part of ballet training. One of the things I've noticed about adult learners (and this could be true of children as well -- I just haven't taught that many kids) is that often, they have a lot more physical capacity than they think they do, but they're pretty out of touch with their bodies, especially in relation to space; for this reason, spending some time lying down or sitting on the floor at the beginning of class (or even between barre exercises) can be very illuminating for them. 

So, basically, what I did was start by introducing three new "subjects" a week from the schema above. Thus, in the first week, I focused on alignment, positions of the feet, and articulation of the feet. What this translated to was lying on our backs on the floor experimenting with turnout, core engagement, isolating the part of the body that was moving from the trunk, pointing and flexing our feet, then standing up and facing the barre to essentially repeat all of these movements in a vertical orientation. I really stressed, especially for those with a little more dance experience, that what we were doing was "tuning our instruments" -- just as every violinist has to start every practice session by tuning the strings of the violin to the standard GDAE sequence, so the ballet dancer has to start each practice session by tuning the body to ballet alignment.

We didn't even really do tendus until the second week, but the crazy thing is that even with just three positions of the feet (1st, 2nd, 3rd), tendu en avant and à la seconde, plié , relevé, and a few positions of the body, I could actually get them off the barre, into center, and doing combinations that looked pretty darn good, considering some of them had never done even ten minutes of ballet a week earlier. We also had a lot of fun towards the ends of these classes, when we would do different ballet walks, which I used to introduce concepts of musicality and expression. 

And so it went, through the first semester (fall), gradually building up skills and confidence. I learned as much from my students as they learned from me, probably more. I gained an appreciation for all the different kinds of bodies and minds that people bring tot he studio, and I got better at planning lessons and remembering my choreography. With beginners, one real trap is doing every single combination with them so they have someone to follow. I am still working on how to wean people from that dependency! Fortunately or unfortunately for me in the regard, I'm currently nursing tendinitis in my right foot, so I can't really go all out. One or two of my students are really struggling without having me there to visually cue them, but most of the time it seems like if I get them started they can take it from there.

Second semester was a chance to go back to the drawing board a bit, since I had a lot of turnover -- of about twelve students only four returned (the others moved away or had injuries or family obligations), and the new crop of beginners included everyone from a woman my own age who had never done ballet, though she had been a pretty sharp ballroom dancer at one time, to some college students and one young teen. I probably did not spend quite as much time slowly building the foundations for this group, but that seemed to work okay.

My spring group was able to perform at the end of the year. Rather than do a "recital" piece where they showed off their movement vocabulary, I decided to really let them dance. I set the choreography to an instrumental version of "Eliza's Aria" from the contemporary ballet suite, Wild Swans, by the composer Elena Kats-Chernin, and incorporated a lot of the classical/romantic movements that denote "swan" in ballet. I was so proud of them in the end, because they just clearly had so much fun performing it, and also, it looked really cool, if I do say so myself. There was this one bit where I had them run in two spiral patterns in opposite directions (clockwise, counterclockwise) weaving through each other, and at first it was just awful chaos, but then, like magic, about a week before the performance, it clicked into place, and it was such a spectacular effect, like a flock of birds wheeling in a murmuration (I know, I know, swans do not do this, starlings do, but it's art, so there's room for artistic license and it never pays to be too literal). 

My amazing swans, photo by Sierra Nicole Lippert

Some of my students came back for the five-week summer session, and it has been fun to see them grow into the role of "experienced dancer" as new people join in. Some of them will be back in the fall, and I'm sure there will be a fresh draft as well. I just have so much fun seeing them develop confidence, artistry, skill, and above all, joy in motion. I hope that even those that don't continue with ballet will always have this little, pleasurable memory of our time learning together.

For the new school year, I've identified a few big things I want to accomplish as a teacher, so that my students can have the best possible experience.

1. I want to help them identify and achieve simple, skill-based goals that are realistic for them, and then do regular check ins to see how they feel they are progressing.

2. I want to give my fall students an end-of-term performance opportunity so that they don't fade away towards the end of the semester as family holiday obligations start to outweigh just going to class. I've noticed that adults seem to like to have a project they're working on, like learning a piece of choreography.

3. Once a month, throw in a class that focuses on conditioning and returning to our sense of turnout and alignment (e.g. floor barre, center barre, even conditioning ball work)

Mostly, I want to keep learning and improving as a teacher and finding ways to extend this "side hustle" of mine into a thoughtful, reflective, and life-affirming practice. We're in for a rough time ahead in the world, I think, and it's important to keep tending the gardens where we can step away from the furor.